Get ready for Round 6 of the 2019 season with our official race preview – think of it as your McLaren encyclopaedia for each race weekend.
Hear from McLaren drivers Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris, get insight from Team Principal Andreas Seidl, and learn more about the wider team with our Spotlight series.
Round 6
| Where | Circuit de Monaco |
| When | 23 - 26 May |
| Start time | 15:10 local, 14:10 BST |
| Laps | 78 |
Carlos Sainz #55
“Monaco is such a special race on the F1 calendar. The history, the track and the atmosphere the whole week makes it something absolutely unique. Obviously, it can be very tricky to overtake here, so setting the car up on Thursday and Saturday morning is more crucial here than anywhere else for a strong result in quali and hopefully the race.
"My focus this weekend is on consistency and finding the limit with patience and confidence in the car. I’ve always been in Q3 and scored points here in the past, so the target is to keep that record going for this year and improve as much as possible.”
Lando Norris #4
“I’m looking forward to heading back to Monaco, it’s a really cool circuit and I managed to get on the podium there last year in F2. This track requires all your concentration and there’s never really a break anywhere around the lap.
“There’s a lot of focus on getting it right on Saturday – it can really make or break your weekend as there aren’t many overtaking opportunities there come Sunday. My target is to put in a good performance in quali and place ourselves in a position to take advantage of any mid-race drama. The key to scoring points here is to ensure we have a clean race.”
Andreas Seidl, Team Principal
“Monaco presents us with a unique challenge within the F1 calendar. The importance of qualifying is even higher there than at other tracks and it will be especially important that our trackside processes and operations work as they should. Points are on offer, but only if we ensure that the weekend runs smoothly.
“We’ve also been working hard since the test in Spain to analyse the information gathered and understand more about the characteristics of our car and the upgrades we brought there, and apply that learning this weekend.
“Given the nature of the Monaco circuit and the scenarios that regularly play out there, pit-stops and the right strategy calls can often play a pivotal role in the outcome of the race. In Spain, we proved that we can execute the fastest pit-stops on the grid and that we have a strategy team which excels at making the right calls in the heat of the moment. Maintaining and improving this high standard is one of our priorities for this weekend.”
Tech heads
| Race distance | 260.286km/161.772 miles |
| Distance to Turn One | 210m/0.13 miles |
| Corners | 19 (13 right, six left) |
| Tyre choice | Hard C3, Medium C4, Soft C5 |
Spotlight: Mark Temple
The spotlight is rarely shone on the team at the factory – but the contribution is no more and no less important. While a rapid pit-stop, bold overtaking move or decisive strategy call earn the plaudits, successes are just as dependent on engineering an upgrade in record time, manufacturing high-quality components, and carrying out stringent analysis and simulation. Every part of the operation needs to work in harmony to see progress on a race weekend. This is the ultimate team sport.
Not only do we want to shine the spotlight on our factory, but our partners and fans also enable us to go racing.
We are a team together. And these are some of the stories.
When did you start working at McLaren?
I joined McLaren fresh from University in 2003 as a transmission designer then worked in vehicle dynamics and more recently, the race team from 2009 - 2017.
Please can you tell us a summary of your job description?
My role as Principal Car Performance Engineer is to ensure strong links between what we do in the factory and what we do at the track, and ultimately exploit and develop the car more effectively.
This means providing support from the factory to the Race Engineering team over race weekends and adding trackside insight into what we do in the factory, linking the activities of different engineering teams.
What do you love about your job?
Making things go faster has always been a bit of an obsession for me, so having spent 10 years trackside working with different engineers, drivers and cars I have built up a lot of knowledge and experience of this.
I am now in the fortunate position that I can use this to help our very talented engineers at the factory and at the track, in our quest to develop a faster car, and I love seeing when our hard work pays off and delivers.
What are you doing when the lights go out?
Nervously watching the data to see if Lando and Carlos get good launches, then checking on the TV to see how well they survive the first corners…
Last thing a driver said to you?
In person, probably Carlos: “See you next week”. On the radio, Jimmie Johnson woohooing when he drove an F1 car for the first time last winter.
What’s the highlight of your McLaren career so far?
Winning races and a Championship as part of a team with such good spirit is a fantastic feeling, and we are doing everything we can to get that feeling back!
What is your earliest McLaren memory?
Watching F1 on TV with my Dad and seeing Senna and Prost battling for domination in McLarens (while I supported Mansell!).
